Numerical study on hypersonic aerodynamic characteristics of the high-pressure capturing wing configuration with wing dihedral

High-pressure capturing wing (HCW) configuration is a potential hypersonic aerodynamic configuration that can simultaneously have good lift-drag characteristics with a large volumetric ratio. The effects of wing dihedral angle on the hypersonic aerodynamic characteristics of a conceptual HCW configuration with two lifting wings are investigated in this paper. Specifically, the dihedral angles of two wings, the upper HCW and the conventional delta wing at the bottom of the body, were regarded as the design variables with a given space. Furthermore, the uniform experimental design method, computational fluid dynamics simulation techniques, and kriging surrogate model algorithm were successively utilized to establish the distributions of aerodynamic parameters over the design space. The results indicate that the lift, drag, and lift-to-drag ratio (L/D) have the similar variation trends as the dihedral angles of the two wings change, and are more sensitive to the positive dihedral angle of the delta wing. When the angle of attack is small, the increasing positive dihedral angle significantly reduces L/D, but as the negative dihedral angle increases, L/D will first increase slightly and then decrease slowly. In particular, when the angle of attack is large, the wing dihedral angles have less influence on L/D. For the longitudinal stability, it is mainly affected by the dihedral angles of the delta wing, and the positive dihedral angle can slightly weaken it, while the negative one hardly changes it. The directional stability can be enhanced by the wing dihedral angles, especially the negative angle. The positive dihedral angle can improve the lateral stability, while the negative weaken it. However, when the angle of attack is large, the large positive dihedral angle of the delta wing may lead to a decrease in the lateral stability.